Wednesday, October 22, 2014

The Importance of the Frontier, I: Power Follows Property

Recently
we received an e-mail from one of our readers who was concerned about the moral
decay of society.Specifically, he was
concerned about how the United States Supreme Court keeps making decisions that
are in clear conflict with humanity’s natural rights, especially life, liberty,
and property.In our opinion, the basic
issue is power.Once people have power,
the Supreme Court will no longer be able to force its morality on others.

Once
we understand, as Daniel Webster pointed out during the Massachusetts
Constitutional Convention of 1820, that “Power naturally and necessarily
follows property,” we know how to counter such aberrations from the natural law
as our reader identified in his e-mail. If we look at history, we can see
that agitation to expand the role of the State in America far beyond what the
framers of the U.S. Constitution ever intended or even imagined began in
earnest with what Frederick Jackson Turner labeled the closing of the frontier
as a result of the end of “free” land under Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead
Act.As far as Turner was concerned, and
as events seem to have demonstrated, the end of easy access to capital in the
form of land meant the end of democracy.

The
year 1894, a year after Turner presented his paper on the effect of the
frontier in American history at the Chicago Exposition during the Great
Depression of 1893-1898, saw the formation of “Coxey’s Army,” a march on
Washington, DC, organized to put pressure on the federal government to inflate
the United States Note ("Greenback") currency to finance public works projects to create
jobs.In less than thirty years the New
Deal laid the foundation of today’s Welfare State and the almost-total
dependence of many Americans on the federal government, either directly in the
form of government jobs and welfare, or indirectly in the form of artificially
created private sector jobs funded by inflationary government spending or
stimulus packages.

Each
expansion of the power of the State has been matched by an equal and opposite
erosion of personal liberty and undermining of the natural law based on nature
and discernible by the force and light of human reason.Sovereignty has shifted from the people
(natural persons) to the collective (an artificial person) as represented by
the State.Our concept of law is now
based not on reason (lex ratio), but
on faith in the will of the strongest (lex
voluntas).

Consequently,
whoever can garner the most political and economic power, thereby enslaving
people by controlling their livelihood, can dictate what constitutes right and
wrong to everyone else.Right now the
“liberals” (who are liberal only with what belongs to others) are in the
ascendant over the “conservatives” (who seek to conserve injustice).

Even
Catholics, who should be more suspicious than anyone about the encroachment of
State power in every aspect of life, but especially into the domestic society of
the family, taking over education and even redefining marriage and family,
spend their efforts debating the types and degrees of State control, not
whether the State should be involved at all.They ignore the wisdom of both Leo XIII and Pius XI, both of whom made
it clear that the primary control over people’s lives — including marriage,
family, education, income, healthcare, and just about everything else — rests
directly and immediately with the family, not the State.

As
Pius XI clearly stated, “Only man, the human person, and not society in any
form, is endowed with reason and a morally free will.” (Divini Redemptoris, § 29.)The
human person is therefore at the center of civil society, not the State,
especially in what pertains to the integrity of the family.This simply reiterated what Leo XIII had
declared forty years previously:

“Man's
needs do not die out, but forever recur; although satisfied today, they demand
fresh supplies for tomorrow. Nature accordingly must have given to man a source
that is stable and remaining always with him, from which he might look to draw
continual supplies. And this stable condition of things he finds solely in the
earth and its fruits. There is no need to bring in the State. Man precedes the
State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of
providing for the substance of his body.” (Rerum
Novarum, § 7.)

Power follows property.As long as the State controls people’s income, the State will control
people — and those with wealth and power will control the State.That is why Leo XIII declared, “We have seen
that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle
that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore,
should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible
of the people to become owners.” (Rerum
Novarum, § 46.)

The propertylessness and thus powerlessness of the ordinary
American has been unable to halt the progress of the destruction of the family
and the resultant glorification of the State and all its works.The remedy is not, however, to attempt to
seize control of the State so that “we” control others for our benefit instead
of “them” controlling us for theirs.Rather, the solution is to empower individuals and families through
widespread capital ownership so that individuals and families can control their
own destinies.